Lisa Fishbayn

Areas of Expertise

Gender and Multiculturalism; Family Law; Political Theory; Law and Religion

Email: fishbayn@brandeis.edu

Current Project

Can the law act as a catalyst to change minority practices that discriminate against women?  My current work explores this issue through considering the development of civil law remedies to alleviate agunot (women denied a divorce under Jewish law).  In particulate, I will evaluate whether these strategies have generated the sort of transformative dialogue envisioned by theorists of multiculturalism and gender.

Biography

Lisa Fishbayn is Director of the Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute of Brandeis University.  The Project focuses on identifying  and disseminating innovative theoretical approaches  to the reconciliation of conflicts  between women’s rights and practices rooted in cultural and religious norms.  A lawyer and legal academic, Dr. Fishbayn writes and consults on gender and multiculturalism in family law.  Her scholarship has dealt with the role of gender in the colonial project, the regulation of transsexual identities in the law of marriage and the transformative potential of dialogue in theories of multicultural accommodation.    

While completing her doctorate at Harvard Law School, Dr. Fishbayn was a lecturer in law at the Faculty of Laws, University College London.   She was a law clerk for Justice Frank Iacobucci of the Supreme Court of Canada.  She has held a graduate fellowship in the Program on Ethics and the Professions at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a Reginald Lewis International Law Fellowship at Harvard Law School.  She has been a visiting researcher working on African customary law at the Gender Research Project of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School.

Education

S.J.D., Harvard Law School

LL.M., Harvard Law School  

LL.B., Osgoode Hall Law School

Representative Publications

Fishbayn, Lisa. “Culture, Gender and the Law.” Gender and Human Rights in The Commonwealth. London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2004.

Fishbayn, Lisa.  “‘Not Quite One Gender or the Other’: Marriage Law and the Containment of Gender Trouble in the United Kingdom.” Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law 15.3 (2007).